After Hours (InterMix)

chapter Five


Morning came way too soon. I overslept, having been too distracted by my colossal mistake to remember to set my alarm, but it was a blessing. I had barely any time to lament what had happened between scrambling to the shower, scrambling into my clothes, and scrambling across the road and through the grounds to Starling, in dire need of coffee.

I didn’t run into Kelly until the hand-off meeting. Ignoring him was a tempting idea, but too cowardly. Ignoring what had happened was better, so I did my best to act like this was any old meeting, that he was any old coworker. Not one who’d made me come twice, then pretty much told me I’d merely been the most convenient p-ssy on hand to satisfy his caveman appetites.

Nope, that guy across the circle was just Kelly, an orderly who happened to work on the same ward as me.

The previous evening his gash had been the worst of it, but overnight a nasty greenish-purple bruise had bloomed around the cut. I was trying my level best not to study it and get caught staring, when Dr. Morris, the senior psychiatrist on duty, gave a curt, doleful sigh, and said, “So, most of you have heard, I’m sure, that Don made a suicide attempt last night.”

A few stoic nods, but I froze, only my lids able to move, blinking their surprise.

Why on earth had Kelly not told me? Not the hottest foreplay ever, I grant you, but you’d think he’d have mentioned it.

Jenny picked up the topic. “We don’t know how, but he got hold of a metal letter opener—”

The group collectively winced and grimaced.

“I know, I know. So please, be extra mindful. Guys, stay vigilant during those room searches. Kel, you saw him this morning, right?”

Kelly nodded. “He’s still groggy. Couldn’t tell you how he’s feeling.”

With Kelly talking, I had a fine excuse to stare at his bruise and cut. He’d got that wrestling the next best thing to a knife out of Don’s hand. It suddenly looked so . . . obscene.

“How real was it?” another orderly asked.

“He was serious,” Kelly said. “He was already bleeding when I showed up—he wasn’t sitting there with the thing at his wrist, waiting for someone to walk in on his big production. He was real pissed to see me.”

My angst toward Kelly faded. He’d come to me after finding his favorite resident in the midst of a suicide attempt, after he’d gotten his temple slashed with the weapon of choice, probably already slick from another man’s blood.

It sucked, feeling used. But it couldn’t have sucked half as bad as whatever Kelly had been feeling when he came to me, needing sexual medicating. I just had to make it clear I wasn’t here to be anybody’s soothing distraction. No man’s jab of temporary calm, infatuation or not.

“So Don’s going to be spending his day with the docs,” Jenny said, with a nod toward Dr. Morris. “We’ll have a couple guys on him, in shifts, but Kel, I want you to sit this one out.”

If you blinked, you’d have missed Kelly’s response. A fly’s wingbeat of overt annoyance, a narrowing of his eyes and hardening of his brow, then it was gone. “Sure.”

“Best we don’t chance letting him see that little souvenir he gave you. Once he’s lucid he’ll be primed to look for reasons to beat himself up over this.”

“You got it.”

The meeting wrapped and it was time for morning meds, residents arriving to queue beyond the large square painted on the floor before the nurses’ station window, the patients’ so-called “zone of privacy.” My heart thumped hard when it was Lonnie’s turn to approach. He’d avoided me my second day, dodged me like I’d been the business end of a skunk. “Not the apologetic type,” Jenny had told me. But today he looked right in my eyes with his magnified ones, and I looked right back, and smiled pleasantly, finding his pill cup and sliding it over. “Good morning, Lonnie.”

“Yeah, morning.” He filled a paper cone from the water cooler.

“Do you have any questions about your medication?”

Nothing.

Jenny asked, “How we feeling today, Lonnie?”

He swallowed his pills and slid the crumpled, empty cone through the slot before shuffling off.

“Not talkative, that’s for sure,” I said.

“He won’t be, with you, not after what happened on Monday. Not for a while. Consider it his version of a sorry.”

Deep in my scrubs’ hip pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. I told myself to ignore it, wisely wary about letting myself get distracted while meds were being distributed and logged. But between careful notes and morning greetings, a thought slipped through.

What if it’s Kelly? A text or something.

Saying what? “Thanks for the p-ssy?” He doesn’t even have your number.

He could have gotten it from someplace. Same as he found out my birthday and my room number.

You shouldn’t give a shit, so you better at least act like you don’t. Let him wait.

It was I who ended up waiting, though, nibbling my psychic fingernails to the quick for an hour before I got a chance to check my phone. And it wasn’t Kelly; it was Amber.

Marco coming today, the text said. Don’t think it’s going to be good. Are you working?

Ah, f*ck. Translated by someone who’s known Amber her entire life, that text said, Marco’s coming and I’m f*cking terrified. Come fix this.

I texted back a quick, When? and waited for the longest ninety seconds ever for her reply. Noon, I think. On his lunch break.

Well, he had a job—that was a new development. But the fact that Amber was freaked-out now, before he’d even arrived, wasn’t good. If she wasn’t really worried, she’d welcome the drama, be more than happy for him to show up so she could make a big scene. This was bad.

I had to go.

No. Not in the middle of work. I needed boundaries.

But Amber needed me, and family came first. I was the only one she had. If I didn’t come running, nobody would.

“Jenny?” I asked as we reorganized the meds.

“Yup.”

“Is there any chance I could take my lunch break off campus?” Our lunches weren’t technically off-the-clock. We took them in shifts during the patients’ lunch period, and at least a couple of nurses needed to hang near the dining area, for emergencies.

She thought a moment. “That should be fine. I don’t think anyone else requested leave. Check the board, though.”

“Great. Thanks.” I bit my tongue, temped to overexplain. Like she needed to hear about my family issues, on top of the crises she was paid to give a shit about.

The morning passed way too slowly. Kelly was on the ward, and if he felt adrift without Don there to keep an eye on, he didn’t let you know it. I glanced at him every now and then, but I felt hardly anything—only the faintest glimmer of lust, a shadow of regret. Worries about Amber’s bad choices eclipsed my own.

So I’d f*cked up and screwed around with my hyper-macho coworker. The boyfriend who’d once shaken Amber so hard she’d had to wear a neck brace for a week was coming over, and not for the latest of a thousand drunken, weepy apologies, from the look of her text.

The second the lunchtime meds were prepped and Jenny gave me the go-ahead, I was bolting down the halls and across campus to the apartment complex. It was twenty-five minutes’ drive to Amber’s, which meant if I sped, I had just enough time to grab her and Jack and pile them in my car and bring them back here, if things looked really bad.

My tires squeaked as I peeled out of my space, taking the speed bump at the exit so fast I bit my lip open. I tasted blood all the way to Amber’s and saw red when I pulled up and spotted Marco’s stupid, shiny, ’roided-out pickup parked next to her sun-bleached Cavalier. Three months he was behind on Jack’s child support, but his rims looked new. Probably never missed a truck payment. The f*cking priorities.

Parking next to him, I slammed my door so hard I almost lost my footing on Amber’s gravel drive. I heard the argument before I caught sight of either of them, and whipped the screen door open, sending it bouncing off the siding with a rattle.

“Erin?” Amber called.

“Yeah.” I found them in the kitchen, standing rigidly on either side of the counter, Jack hugged to Amber’s hip, huge blue eyes full of confusion. I wanted to take him in my arms and shut those perfect little lids on all this.

Amber’s eyes were just as huge. Skinny legs in a too-short jean skirt, dirty-blond hair a wet tangle, flip-flops on her feet. Still my baby sister, in so many ways. She looked pissed, but not hurt or scared. Marco looked like the douche he was, nearly tall and nearly muscular, nearly shaved head. Like you’d left Kelly out in the sun for a week to soften and grow tan.

“Hey, Erin,” Marco said, gaze on my sister.

“What are you doing here?”

He did that thing I hate, sucking a snorting, snotty breath through his nose, a glimmer of the fat old townie he’d one day become. “Had some business to discuss with Amber. And to see my son.”

Don’t say it, I beamed to Amber. But I could see on her face, even my little instigator wasn’t calling Marco’s paternity into question, not today. Good girl.

“He thinks I’m seeing some guy he knows,” Amber said. “Some guy I’ve never even met, just because his stupid drunk friend thought he saw us together at some bar.”

“He wasn’t drunk. And it was you. I know that pink sweatshirt he said you was wearing.”

“He’s met me twice. How’s he supposed to f*cking pick me out of a f*cking lineup?”

I shot Amber a look. Don’t you f*cking dare turn my nephew into one of those little shits who drops F-bombs before the training wheels have even come off his bike. He was her son, though, not mine. Her little barnacle, stuck following her into murky waters, same as we were Mom’s.

“You should go,” I told Marco. “Even if she was seeing someone, it’s none of your business. Your business is to pay child support and be a good role model for your son.” In my head, the studio audience roared with laughter.

“Don’t act like you get to boss me around, just ’cause you’re wearing those scrubs. You’re not a doctor and everyone f*cking knows it.”

“Don’t act like you get to push my sister around, just because you’re bigger than her.”

“Er’n,” Jack interjected, reaching out a chubby arm and breaking my already banged-up heart.

“Hi, baby.”

“I ain’t touched her,” Marco said.

Not today, maybe.

“If you said what you needed to, just go, Marco.”

He took a couple backward steps toward the door, shouting past me. “I better not hear nothin’ about you and him.”

“You better not be threatening me,” Amber shot back, ignoring my telepathic commands that she keep her mouth shut, keep him moving toward the exit.

I matched Marco pace for pace, corralling him to the front of the house. “It was obviously a misunderstanding. Confront the guy about it, not the mother of your kid. Okay?”

“I will,” he said, nodding. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“Great. Fine.”

He reached the door and shoved it open. I followed, Amber and Jack a few paces behind me. “I have to head back, the second he’s gone,” I told her over my shoulder.

“Really?”

“Sorry. But yeah. It’s my first week and I can’t lose this job.”

She shot me a bratty, beseeching look but I saw resignation in her eyes. She stayed on the front stoop. Jack was thrashing, wanting to follow his dad or me. Amber set him down, holding his hand tight. I walked down to the driveway a few steps behind Marco, ever the bouncer.

He opened his door, leaning his meaty arm on the top of the window as he called, “F*cking pathetic, calling your sister to back you up.”

My eyes narrowed. “Pathetic that she should need to.”

“F*ck you, Erin. You love this, don’t you? Playing mommy. Feeling all important. Bet you’d take the kid if you could. But he’s my son. Don’t you f*cking forget that.”

My temper was fraying. Amber-words were begging to be said. Mom-words, impulsive and baiting. Don’t you f*cking jump to any conclusions about who his father is, you worthless sack. “Just be a good guy. Chill out and send her the money.”

“I’m a good dad.”

Oh yeah, father of the frigging year. I locked my arms over my chest on the other side of his door. “Don’t let her wind you up,” I said quietly, changing my strategy.

It earned me a relaxing of his bunched shoulders, a softening of his features. If I didn’t hate his guts so much, I could’ve admitted he was actually pretty handsome.

“She knows just what buttons to push,” he said.

“I know that.” I knew them, too, I just chose not to do the pushing. “You’re a dad now. You have to control your own buttons.”

For just a second, I thought I’d calmed him down. Then his expression went dark as a flash thunderstorm. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need no advice from you. You never gave me a chance, not since the first time I met you.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. The smallest, meanest sound, plucked right from Amber’s mouth. “The first time I met you, you got wasted and called my little sister a bitch when she asked you to clean up a beer you spilled.”

“I was drunk.”

“Exactly, Marco. Exactly.” I shook my head. “Get back to work. Congratulations on landing a job.” I’d meant the last remark sincerely, but given the conversational context, I couldn’t fault him for misconstruing.

“F*ck you, Erin.”

I tossed my hands up and turned away, done with him. I dug my keys from my scrubs’ pocket.

“Yeah, that’s right. Play your little part. Little Miss Better Than Everyone. Like you didn’t grow up with the same slut mom your little slut sister did.”

I whirled around, the world gone crimson as a stab wound. “Get the f*ck out of here,” I said, so quiet and slow and deadly I gave myself chills.

“Truth hurts,” Marco said, and his smug-ass grin was the final straw. When he got inside his cab and slammed the door, I spat on his windshield and gave him the finger. In the half second it took, my brain screamed Mistake! ten thousand times over.

His door flew open.

“You f*cking touch my truck—”

Logic told me to run but my body was marching to meet his, some idiot bit of my programming thirsty for blood and shrieking Mama bear! Activate! I fisted my car key and slammed it against his gleaming hood, drew it with a squeal down the perfect, glossy red paint, and wished with every cell in my body I was rending his chest open.

Then his hands were around my arms, thumbs digging into my flesh. Thoughtless, I drove my fists up between us the way I’d practiced a thousand times in restraints. I broke his hold and thumped his chin. He grunted, and when he opened and closed his mouth his teeth were pink. He must have bitten his tongue.

“You f*cking psycho cunt.”

“Excuse me?” Twice in one week I get cunt hurled at me? I couldn’t hit Lonnie but I could sure as f*ck hit Marco. I came at him flailing, but he grabbed my arms again and shook me hard.

I heard Amber yell, “Let her go!” I heard gravel grinding under our shoes, heard Jack begin to wail.

“Stay on the steps!”

Marco’s grip on my arm was gone. He charged me a pace and gave me a hard shove. My feet weren’t quick enough, and I stumbled, trying to catch myself on my car. But I was too far away, and my elbow banged dully against the door; then pain exploded in my face as my temple hit the side mirror.

I heard Amber yell my name. Jack’s wailing turned to shrieks. It was the latter that had pebbles beneath my palms and my arms shoving me to kneeling, my hand finding the car door as I forced my legs to work and let me stand. My face hurt, but it was dry. My elbow hurt, but the joint didn’t scream when I bent it. One of the knees of my scrubs was split and my skin felt raw, but I didn’t care. I stared at Marco, stared right in his face with adrenaline pulsing through me like pure, molten hate.

With my eyes I told him, I’m gonna f*ck you up for making my family cry. But my body hurt, and my brain got its say. My brain said he’d win, if he wanted.

What he wanted, apparently, was nothing more to do with any of us.

“Crazy bitches.” He hawked and spat on the dirt and climbed back inside his truck, reversing out of the driveway as slow and lazy as you please.

When he rolled onto the street and drove off, I realized I’d won. I was hurt and scraped up, but I’d won that fight, somehow.

Amber hurried over, holding Jack to her chest with one arm, smoothing my hair back with her free hand.

“Am I bleeding?”

“No. But it’s real red. Lemme get you some frozen peas or something.”

“I have to get back to work. And you have to call the cops, and tell them where he lives and what happened. Tell them I’ll come and give a statement, the second I’m off work.” While the bruise is still nice and heinous, I thought grimly.

“Okay.” She said it too quietly for me to trust.

“Do it today, Amber. Do it right now. Give them my number, so they can call and arrange for me to meet with them. Don’t you dare p-ssy out.”

“Okay, okay.”

I nearly believed her that time.

Despite my speeding, I got back late. I hurried to the empty locker room and changed into fresh scrub bottoms and shoved the ones with the ripped, crusty knee deep underneath the wadded paper towels in the trash can. I checked my eye in the mirror over the sink, and it was pretty gross. My lid was puffy and pink and shiny, the skin under my eyebrow purple, radiating red. It was a job for an eye patch, not concealer. Sadly I had neither, so I rinsed my face and smoothed my hair, and headed for the sign-in room, walking as tall as I could.

And of course I ran into Kelly. Of course I did.

He was filling a cup of coffee from a carafe and I ignored him, scouting for a dry erase marker.

“Drawer by your hip,” he said.

“Thanks.” I had to turn to open it, though, and he saw.

“Whoa.” I looked up in time to catch his pale eyes growing wide. “What the f*ck? Who did that to you?”

“Not a patient.”

A glare eclipsed his icy irises. “Who, then?”

“None of your business.” I dug through the drawer. Highlighter, no. Sharpie, no.

He strode to the freezer and pulled out an ice pack, squishing the gel inside and wrapping it in a paper towel. “Here.”

I abandoned my search, pressing the pack to my face. “Thanks.” Six more hours in my shift, and probably twenty more times I’d have to say “no comment” when someone asked how I’d managed to get a black eye during my lunch hour. I glanced at the gash on Kelly’s temple, and way too many details about what had happened after he’d turned up injured at my threshold revisited me in a breath.

“So who did that?” he demanded again, locking his dumb, huge arms over his dumb chest.

“A ’93 Tempo.”

“Where were you at lunch?”

I sighed and leaned wearily against the counter. “Don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t.”

“I got in a fight with my sister’s a*shole ex-boyfriend. He shoved me and I tripped, and hit my eye on my side mirror.”

His own eyes narrowed. “Where is he?”

“Oh, come off it, Kelly. I don’t need some tough guy to sic on another tough guy. I’ve had enough of your type to last a lifetime.”

“You call the cops?”

“My sister did,” I said, praying it was true. “Everything’s under control. Quit hassling me about it.”

He stepped close and I let him take the ice pack away. He squinted at my bruise, and I studied his eyes. They were nearly a color today, a frozen lake reflecting a clear blue—

“Ahhh, ow.” I fidgeted as he pressed my brow bone, the spot tender.

“You break anything?” Press, press, press.

“I don’t think so. But my head might explode if you keep poking me.” He let me go and gave me back the ice pack. I nearly missed his body when he stepped away. Reeling and tired, I tried a joke. “Think this’ll earn me some cred with the residents?”

He smiled. My heart suddenly felt as swollen and bruised as my face.

“Want me to lie for you?” he asked. “Tell everyone you got that shiner doing something tough, on the ward?”

I wandered past him and found a marker in the drawer. I wiped lunch off-campus from beside my name and wrote general in its place. “Nah. I’ll seem more badass if I leave it a mystery.”

He followed me into the hall. “I will get you to tell me who this guy is.”

Holding the pack in place, I shot him a one-eyed glare as the keypad beeped. I pushed in the stairwell door. “I’m a grown-ass woman.”

“And some shit who calls himself a man gave you a black eye.”

I stopped short on the landing between floors. He was two steps behind me, and our faces were nearly level. “What are you gonna do if I tell you, Kelly? Hunt him down and beat the crap out of him?”

“Likely.”

“Which’ll solve what?”

“More than some slap on the wrist from the cops, if I know the type.”

“Well you don’t. You don’t know me or my sister or her problems. You don’t know anything about us, so butt out. We don’t need rescuing.” Amber did, but that was my job. Today hadn’t been my finest moment, granted, but if any dog was going to snarl and bark and bite on her behalf, it was this bitch. Guys only ever made things worse.

When we reached the third floor, Kelly said, “Lemme take you out for a drink after work.”

I sighed, pausing with my keycard in hand. Did I really want to sit on a stool in some dive, with my knee touching Kelly’s, and numb myself with a drink and a big reassuring wall of muscle? Yeah, a little. But no way in hell did I think it was smart. Over my shoulder I said, “I’ve seen plenty of you already this week, off the clock.”

“So see some more.”

“Quit trying to save me.”

“Who said I was?”

I tapped my card to the lock and pushed in the door, aiming myself down the hall to the ward.

“You really wanna head to bed after the second half of your shift, look at yourself in a mirror and try to fall asleep, thinking about all this shit? Come out for a drink.”

I punched the code to let us into the deserted lounge. “No.”

I marched toward the rec room to find Jenny and catch up with my duties, to get lost in all the details that wouldn’t allow me to think about anything else. About Amber or Marco or Kelly Robak.

“I’ll meet you at my truck at seven twenty,” Kelly said.

Just before I veered off for the nurses’ booth, I mouthed a f*ck off in his direction.

And damn him to hell, he smiled. “Seven twenty it is.”

* * *

The cops from Amber’s town called me around four, and one of them came out to Larkhaven and I gave him my statement in the staff parking lot, where he took a couple of digital photos of my ripening bruise. I hoped something would come of it. Anything. But even if the system was in our favor, I didn’t trust Amber to not suddenly drop charges.

At least work was quiet. And at least I had the next day off. During Saturday shifts we didn’t have to do any inventory, which saved a ton of time. Kelly and a couple of other orderlies were escorting some of the Starling residents to the campus chapel, one of the rare opportunities the men got for a field trip. I’m sure the change of scenery motivated them far more than a chance to get good with the Lord, but then again, living in a locked ward, a few minutes’ fresh air and sunshine were probably a damn-near religious experience. And praise Jesus for an hour free of Kelly Robak.

Once the last meds of the shift were distributed and my notes logged, Jenny told me to go ahead and keep an eye on things in the rec room. The subtext being, You’re a mess. Go watch TV with the patients until hand-off.

I took her up on the offer, gladly.

Having sort of won that fight with Marco and squared away the stuff with the police, I was feeling strangely capable and strong and Zen, despite my exhaustion. Despite f*cking up and taking Marco’s bait, channeling the emotional intelligence of a four-year-old. I plopped down in an easy chair kitty-corner from Lonnie and greeted him with a big old smile.

His magnified eyes swiveled to my bruise. “It suits you.” He was deadpan, and I chose not to read it as meaning he was pleased to think I’d been punched in the face.

“I may get the other side done to match,” I told him, equally deadpan.

I kept my eyes on the TV, but I was pretty sure he smiled, in my periphery.

The hand-off meeting was low-key, as it’d been a relatively calm day on the ward. After my day-shift colleagues with minor incidents to relay had made their reports, there was a silence, several night-shifters staring at me expectantly.

“Oh,” I said, touching my brow. “No, this was recreational.” I hadn’t meant it to be funny, but a couple people laughed, and it actually cheered me some.

I didn’t feel like getting grilled while the group was signing out, so I changed first, and fast. There were only two orderlies chatting in the coffee room when I logged out, neither of them Kelly, and neither said a thing to me aside from good night.

As I pulled open the door to the lot, June had never smelled so good.

Predictably, Kelly was standing beside his truck, next to the little set of brick steps I’d take up to the lawn. He opened the passenger side as I strode in his direction.

He patted the top of the door frame. “Ready to go, Nurse Roughneck?”

“I told you no,” I said, plainly aiming myself toward the steps.

“And I’m telling you get in.”

F*ck me, the nerve.

I glared at him a long time, just taking in the physically superior, bossy, heterosexual white male aged eighteen to sixty standing before me. Like this guy didn’t already get his way, every place he paused as he moved through the world.

It was time to draw the line. And the line went straight up the crotch of my panties.

I stopped and locked my arms over my chest, Kelly-style. “I’ve had it up to my black eye with pushy men today, Robak. I’m going home to sleep. And I’m not answering my door, no matter how hard anybody knocks.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

I dropped my head back, sighing loudly into the darkening sky. “Jesus.” I looked him in the eyes. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Whatever will shut you up so I can go home and collapse.”

“Six thirty,” he said, slamming the passenger door. “We’ll grab dinner.”

“Yeah, sure. We’ll grab dinner. We’ll grab one drink, and nothing else will get grabbed for the rest of the night.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” I jammed my purse over my shoulder and marched past him and up the steps to the lawn.

“See you then. Dress pretty.”

“F*ck off, Kelly.”